Side Effects Might Include Nausea, Itching, and a Cluttered Desktop

Does your desktop often look like this at the end of a busy, productive day?

If so, you might have a screenshot problem.

Screenshots are such a critical part of collaboration. But an efficient workflow surrounding them is often overlooked. Most products that even attempt to solve this problem usually just offer something around “auto uploading” every screenshot you take. But we believe that’s not the optimal approach.

Not every screenshot you take throughout the day is meant to be shared. Sometimes, especially as a designer or a developer, you might take a screenshot as part of your own personal workflow, and uploading it to the cloud us unnecessary. It also might be of sensitive information that you don’t want uploaded to the cloud.

For all the screenshots that you do want to share, you still end up with a cluttered mess of files sitting around on your desktop or Dropbox folder that you have to clean up later.

Early on, we decided to take a different approach with Droplr and sharing screenshots. We give you capture controls, both via our menubar app and system hotkeys, that allow you to take a screenshot and give you a link to it, all without having the file saved on your desktop.

This method of taking screenshots comes directly from our “share it and forget it” philosophy of working.

On the Mac app, we even made the screenshot hotkey just one key away from OS X’s standard screenshot hotkey. On OS X, to take a standard screenshot, you press “cmd+shift+4”. With Droplr installed, using “opt+shift+4” will give you the same system screenshot controls, but instead of saving the file to your desktop, it will upload it to our service and copy the link to your clipboard. It really is just a better way to work.

We keep iterating on this workflow to make visual collaboration with Droplr as seamless as possible. On the Mac app, we recently added both the ability to a) annotate screenshot images with shapes, arrows and text and b) capture screen video instead of just a static image. Look for these features coming to our Windows application in the near future.